


Duct-Tape Scars on my Honey

by Arowen12



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), My Chemical Romance
Genre: Binding Scars, Canon scars, Gen, Ghoul's scar, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Jet's eyepatch, Minor disfigurement, Non-Binary Party Poison, SING (Music Video), Top surgery referenced
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21958450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arowen12/pseuds/Arowen12
Summary: They all have scars. Some they came with; some they leave with.The sun brightens the scars, takes everything that makes them or made them and brings it to the forefront. You don’t ignore your past, your scars in the desert. Scars are evidence of life, survival, growth; growth in the desert is important when few things dare to, its rebellion in its purest form.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 54





	Duct-Tape Scars on my Honey

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays y'all. Hello everyone, I am here with another MCR story, my second in like a week even when I should be working on other stuff. Anyways, I couldn’t get this idea out of my head, especially after watching the video for SING again and the Reunion concert when Gerard sings the line and draws his hand over his chest. There is talk of binding scars and cutting in here so if that is a trigger please be cautious, also I’m not extremely familiar with binding so I tried my best to be accurate. Read on and enjoy!

They all have scars. Some they came with; some they leave with.

The sun brightens the scars, takes everything that makes them or made them and brings it to the forefront. You don’t ignore your past, your scars in the desert. Scars are evidence of life, survival, growth; growth in the desert is important when few things dare to, its rebellion in its purest form.

In the city, everyone is pale even those with darker pigments seem grey, and the advertisements are filled with ways to erase the wrinkles of age or the scars of life, until you can be as shiny as plastic, as still and lifeless as the manikins in the windows.

Kobra Kid has scars. A large patch of discoloured white on his knee from the first time he rode his motorcycle and crashed into a brick wall, it jumped out at him. There’s a long thin one on his collar bone from a rusty handle in the old garage which he had to get a tetanus shot for, back when they still had shots for it and not pills. But the scars, the ones he can’t escape, can’t unsee every day are the ones on his arms.

They climb his wrists to his forearms, layers of white like static on the old tv in their basement, overlapping and criss-crossing, they’re white against the already pale skin of the inside of his arms. Kobra doesn’t hate the scars anymore, he’ll shrug off his leather jacket in the comfort of the dinner and not feel as if he’s shrugging off a layer of skin. But the memory of what the scars were weighs heavily on him some days more than others and he can’t see them for all they remind him of the blood, the fuzziness, the pain.

Party knows first, they know when Kobra begins amidst the grey and the pills, but their so conked out on their own cocktail that they don’t say anything; that’s when they both know something’s wrong. Party always gets a guilty look when they see Kobra’s arms, they’ll run their fingers over the smooth skin, the white-out lines and mumurs apologies until Jet or Ghoul distracts them with the promise of a new hit.

Jet is the second to find out. He’s the best medic out of all of them and Kobra takes a blaster to the shoulder early on in their acquaintance outside of the city. He peels away the scorched tatters of his sweater and goes silent for a long moment. Those are the moments when Kobra feels self-conscious when the thoughts trapped inside his head like a demon in a bottle whisper of shame, of embarrassment. Jet doesn’t turn away, doesn’t make a face of disgust, he presses his lips to the scars on each arm and says, “Thanks for surviving.”

Kobra cries, a waste of water in the desert, and they don’t speak of it again. Jet will still gently hold one of Kobra’s arms when he’s patching him up and he’ll press a kiss to the marked skin with soft eyes and kind hands.

Ghoul finds out next, its not anything big or momentous. The dinner gets real hot one day, like the desert itself is trying to smoke them out, its hot enough that the crickets fry on the hot stones without a fire and even Party’s hair looks limp. They all strip down to the skimpiest clothing they have, like they’re going out to one of Pony’s parties, and that’s when Ghoul notices.

He freezes amidst waxing poetic about dogs over cats and just stares at Kobra for a long minute. Kobra thinks he might have a bug on his face, sometimes they get really big like they migrated straight from the other side of the world. Then Ghoul clambers over the table and grasps Kobra’s wrists with gentle figures, tears are spilling down Ghoul’s cheeks and Kobra’s really not sure how he’s supposed to react. Ghoul says quietly, “These are old right?”

Kobra nods and Ghoul apologizes for something and wraps Kobra in a tight hug, one of Ghoul’s infamous ones where he tries to climb you like a tree and squeeze the life out of you; its rumoured that the hugs are sanctioned by the witch as a method of death. Kobra goes stiff cause hugs aren’t his things but after a few seconds he settles and that’s that.

The Girl is the last to know, she’s the last to arrive after all. He’s showing her how to hack one of the BL vending machines and his jacket rides up to the creases of his elbows. The Girl goes silent before she reaches out and traces over the scars.

“What happened? Did you get caught in a sandstorm? Party says that can shred the skin off right to your bones.”

The Girl asks, Kobra shakes his head and crouches down so he can look her in the eyes when he says, “I was in a lot of pain to the point of numbness when Party and I were in the city. The only way I could acknowledge that I was alive, that I could feel things was through these cuts. But it was dangerous and I almost died many times, its not the right way to deal with those things.”

“What is the right way?”

She asks trailing her fingers childishly over the lines over and over again, like she’s pressing them into her own skin. Kobra frowns and glances at the stretch of the horizon dusty with the weight of the ground below he says, “You find something to live for, like Party, like you.”

“Me?”

She asks with her big eyes and Kobra nods as he presses the final button and the ray guns rattle out of the machine in pure untainted white. He presses one into her too small hands and says. “Scars are proof you lived, never be ashamed of them.”

Kobra’s scars are like beacons in the white of the lobby as he stands back to back with Party and knows its all futile; its all over.

Party Poison has scars, they stand out against their tanned skin unlike Kobra’s always pale skin; he never tans just burns. Party thinks they have too many scars sometimes, sometimes it’s the right amount though a constellation formed of their past spanning their whole body.

There are the ones on their wrists, a whole variety of sizes stretching up to the tips of their fingers from carving knives, palette knives, and wicked sharp spray can lids. They’re proud of these scars, the blood that drips into their art as they paint grey walls red or turn a boring stretch of canvas into an explosion of colour, those are the scars they admire.

There are other ones, the patched discoloured skin on the left side of their stomach where they took a blaster bolt fleeing the city, or the one on their back from an accident with a Crash Queen, the one on their knee from a nasty car crash in one of the derbies.

But the scars that stand out are the ones on their chest. They like their anchors, the ones that curve under their nipples, still almost pinkish rather than white after years, some days they can’t resist the urge to shuck their jacket, their shirt and stare at their chest. There are other scars though, ones that sometimes they want to hide from when the only thing they could get their hands on was medical tape or duct-tape. Little splotches of red-almost pink on their chest, the way sometimes its still hard to catch their breath with the press of their ribs. They wouldn’t trade anything for it though.

They remember when they first saw their chest after, in the medical tent at the Ills and Ailments convention the second month after they were swallowed by the desert and regurgitated, the sense of right and _finally._ Because BL doesn’t encourage thinking, and if you ~~think~~ know you’re in the wrong body, the wrong gender, or even no gender, you’re clearly thinking too much.

Kobra knows before the scars are even there, before he helps wrap Party every day. Because even amidst the drugged-out haze Party feels wrong, not quite settled, like their heart is trying to climb out of their chest with all of their bones for fun. When they reach the desert it all makes sense and Pony sits him down a month before the surgery and they talk until the sun winks into the sky and the guys can speculate all they want but they only talk.

But Kobra knows first and he nods, completely supportive. When the surgery is done and Party is groggy off the lightest anesthesia they have (it may have been chloroform but the doctor said trade secrets) Kobra cares for Party and when the scars are healed, he’s the first to run his fingers gently over the anchors and smile.

Ghoul and Jet find out at the same time. The four of them find an old motel with an indoor pool, the water is an almost-clear brown, like a moat outside of a medieval castle, and Party doesn’t care as they strip off their top and their tight jeans. They haven’t swam in years, water is a precious commodity in the desert.

“Woah Party, what happened to your chest?”

Ghoul asks first and Party pauses before they’re able to jump into the pool and faces Jet and Ghoul who look shocked. Party glances at their chest, the scars are still somewhat fresh, but healed enough Party doesn’t think the pool will kill them. They shrug and glance at Kobra, who is lounging on a poolside chair with their glasses and a long sleeve-shirt on.

“I was born with the wrong parts.”

Party replies, and Jet gets it, he always gets it, and nods but Ghoul tilts his head like a puppy and asks, “Like an android?”

“Sort of.”

Party nods and Jet rolls his eyes and tugs Ghoul to the corner for a long moment as Party sticks their toes into the lukewarm water and peers at the bottom wondering if there are flesh-eating piranhas. A moment later Jet and Ghoul come back, Jet settles his hand on Party’s shoulder and says, “Dude you know we totally support you right?”

Yeah of course they’re family. They nod. Ghouls smiles, a grin that usually promises mischief or explosions, sometimes both, and replies, “I think they’re wicked.”

Then they team up and shove Party into the pool. He splashes them and Ghoul tackles him while Jet attempts the ardours task of getting Kobra into the pool, there may be hissing involved. Party grins at Ghoul when he swims closer, prepared to splash him, but he just trails gentle fingers over his chest and says, “Happy you’re in the right body dude.”

“Me too.”

The Girl finds out last, Party goes down in a firefight, jumping in front of her before the blast can hit. Its not a bad blast, one to the left shoulder and Party can keep firing until they’re down on their knees and The Girl takes the blaster from their fingers and ghosts four dracs on her own.

Jet rips off their shirt to get at the wound and The Girl stares with wide eyes at the scars, she’s seen enough blaster wounds to know a nasty one and Party will bitch and complain but it isn’t that bad. She reaches out and touches their chest and asks, “What happened?”

“That part of me didn’t fit right so we had to get it adjusted, like when your pants are too long.”

Party replies grasping Kobra’s hand until their knuckles are white as Jet disinfects the blast wound and begins to bind it. The Girl stares at him for a long moment like she thinks they’re babying her before she nods in acceptance and that’s that.

Their scars are hidden in the haze of ray guns and beneath their jacket as they stare into Korse’s eyes and know its all over.

Fun Ghoul has scars, so many scars that sometimes its hard to find a patch without any scars or tattoos. His knees are a patchwork of white spots from slamming into the ground with a guitar in his hands and nothing but the music to guide him, white patches on his elbows from slamming them into walls and other people with jewellery on their faces, a blast scar on his lower back, the stretch of a scar up his leg from a run in with a Motorbaby with a knife.

But there’s another scar, new and fresh in the aftermath of the standoff.

The dracs for once aren’t the total equivalent of Stormtroopers and its only that gut wrench that forces Ghoul to slide to the left, the ray still catches him in the jaw. It cauterizes instantly, mostly a flesh wound but burning hot with rivulets of blood dripping to the floor as he drops to the ground from a stunner.

Jet is the first to notice, the first to wake, crawling to check their pulses and pressing one of Pony’s special mixes into Party’s and Kobra’s mouth before he crawls to Ghoul. There’s blood pouring down the side of Jet’s face as he rolls Ghoul over and pours the mix down his throat already pulling out crap from his jacket as Party and Kobra splutter and scream their way to life.

Its better not to question what’s in Pony’s mix, just to know that its an affront to God.

It burns the whole way down, like the sun has settled in his bones and Ghoul jerks upright with a choked off scream the syrupy taste combined with something bitter leaving a horrible aftertaste. Blood is sticky and hot down the side of his jaw and Ghoul’s whole face feels lit up like he was caught in a sandstorm.

Jet curses, he never curses, and wipes away the blood, disinfects with the bottle they keep on hand and out of Party’s reach. It burns enough to bring tears to Ghoul’s eyes and he opens his mouth to swear at Jet and then get called a baby, but the slightest twitch of his jaw is explosive and he presses his lips shut.

Party wants to go after The Girl immediately but Jet protests and it must the blood that convinces them because their shoulders slump in defeat and they trudge to the car. Kobra and Jet help Ghoul onto his feet and Jet supports him all the way into the backseat.

“You have any of Bone Wish’s special shit?”

Party asks as they whip down Guano, the radio is silent and Party is carved of stone. Bone Wish is one of their doctors, an old black woman with a hundred scarves and a kind face she always manages to create miracles out of nothing and her paste is something similar.

“A little. Enough for some scarring.”

Jet says as they pull up in front of the dinner and Ghoul tips from side to side as he is pulled inside by Kobra who is furious and showing it, an emotional Kobra is a terrifying one. Jet forces Ghoul onto one of the shiny seats and opens up the tin, he scrapes some of the off-yellow paste and spreads it over Ghoul’s jaw. It burns like fuck and Ghoul has to bite his gloves to muffle the screams.

The days blur together as the wound scabs and scars, Ghoul can’t open his mouth wide enough for the jerky or the crickets and is relegated to Power Pup and smoothies of questionable quality and colour that he only trusts because Jet handles the kitchen with an iron ladle he borrowed from Kitty.

He goes silent like the rest of them, stewing in their failures but also because opening his mouth is painful and stretches at the healing scabs. He can feel the need for a joke or something like an anvil on his chest as Party barters everything for the blueprints and he assembles bomb after bomb in the bathroom.

Kobra is the first to acknowledge the scar beyond Jet’s daily check-ups. They’re working by candle light, some fruity summer shit, and the scars on Kobra’s arms are pale as paint when he reaches out and trails fingers over Ghoul’s jaw light as a feather.

“Does it hurt?”

Ghoul nods and opens his mouth for a moment the words on the tip of his tongue before he shuts it at the twinge the movement brings. Kobra nods and glances down at the plans with a narrowed expression, staring at the scars on his arms.

Party notices next, it’s just the two of them in the back room while Jet and Kobra go speak with Doctor D about the retrieval and its been quiet for a long time but for the crackle of the radio transmitting. They roll over suddenly, away from the ray guns, and they stare at Ghoul in the light peaking through the rattling blinds.

“You’ve been quiet, I miss it.”

“Hard to speak with your jaw wired shut.”

Ghoul replies in a whisper and the words feel tentative on his tongue, uncertain. Party glances down and away for a long span of seconds before they glance back at Ghoul and reach out to press a kiss above the scar on his cheek.

“You’re you, even without your voice.”

Party reassures and Ghoul nods and replies, “Won’t matter soon anyways.”

The Girl doesn’t have the chance to notice amidst the rays firing overhead and the mass of dracs filling the lobby. It’s chaos and not the good kind, the kind of parties and revelry, this is terror and knowing as he fires again and again, watches first Party, then Kobra go down and suddenly half of him is just _gone_.

They drag the girl to the doors and Ghoul knows what he has to do as he presses a kiss to the girl’s head and shuts the door behind him. He wants last words to say something to be remembered, to be carried to the witch, but there is nothing.

Jet has scars, not as many as the others, but they litter his skin all the same, scrapes on the broad stretch of his hands from helping with the Trans AM, a nasty one on the back of his calve from when he was twelve and riding his bicycle. But he isn’t wild like Ghoul, has no scars of survival like Kobra, or transformation like Party.

Until the firefight.

A bottle to the head from a drac and suddenly there’s darkness on the right and pain like fucking nothing he’s experienced before. Jet shoots the drac and then there’s the shoot out, blood trickling down his face and his hand shaky as he aims and fires, it goes wide and then he’s hit by a stunner.

He’s the first one, always the first one to take a stunner and get up. Doctor D thinks it’s cause he’s got more muscle, The Girl thinks it’s cause his hair absorbs most of it. His heart drops out of his chest at the thought of her as he crawls first to Party, he pulls out Pony’s stuff and dumps it down their throat and then Kobra’s before he crawls to Ghoul, who has a nasty wound on his face that Jet attempts to clean.

It’s only when they’re back at the dinner and Ghoul’s mostly been taken care of, but for the silent whining, that Ray drags Ghoul into the washroom to help him. You would think Kobra would be good at it but anything gory and he turns as green as Ghoul’s stupid Frankenstein mask, and Party’s just as bad; give them gore and they’re fine but medical procedures ick the shit out of them.

It takes an hour and a half to pick out the shards of glass and Jet’s hands don’t feel connected to his body as he attempts to help Ghoul whose hand is shaking a little bit and who looks like he might start crying whether from pain or something else Jet can’t tell; its okay Jet has tears already running down his cheeks salt and hurt.

When it’s done Jet stares in the cracked mirror with Party’s weirdly endearing graffiti and stares with his left eye and knows that’s it. Jet wipes away the blood and smears Bone Wish’s cream over his eye before digging through the first aid kit to find the makeshift eyepatch, he wraps it around his head and stares in the mirror. He turns to walk out the door and bumps into the doorway; twice.

Dr. D takes one look at Jet and wheels into the back room before he returns with a black leather eye patch, Jet tries to offer him some ones and zeros but the Doctor shakes his head and tells him to be careful. Jet hasn’t driven the Trans AM since, and its Party who nods and starts the car when they’re done.

Jet forces himself to go out every day and practice with the ray gun, feeling like he’s a Motorbaby fresh onto the coarse sand with no sense of up or down as their plan assembles itself in fragments and pieces every day. He trips and collides with pieces of furniture till he feels like one big bruise as he applies the cream and watches it scar, his pupil is no longer brown but a murky colour like the pool water of that motel.

Ghouls notices first as he smears the paste over his cheek he reaches out and touches the edge of the gauze eye patch and asks, “Permanent?”

“A real pirate now.”

Jet replies and Ghoul cracks the ghost of a grin but its all he can do with the slasher grin scar over his jaw. Jet applies the cream carefully and doesn’t stop Ghoul when he unwraps the eyepatch, or when he starts crying silently but for hitched breaths.

Kobra notices next, as he’s the one that has to drive them to the Doctor’s to talk about the getaway; Party didn’t even give a five-point lecture on the rules of driving the car. They blast down Route Guano, Mad Gear and the Missile Kid rumble low from the speakers as Jet tugs at the eye patch.

“You’ll still be able to shoot straight.”

“Don’t need to for dracs, but yeah.”

Jet replies and the rest of the drive is silent but when they stop Kobra leans over the stick and presses a light kiss to the leather of the eyepatch and Ray wraps a hand around his in thanks as they get out of the car.

Party notices in that silent way, they slide up to him in the booth as Ghoul detonates an explosion in the distance and Kobra carefully is gathering what they’re leaving behind. Party’s fingers are feather light as they dance over the back of Jet’s head and undo the patch, it falls onto the table and Party sucks in a harsh gasp when he sees it.

“It’s fine.”

Jet says and covers his hands, they can’t afford to be burning with anger right now. They have to be the cold of the desert at night, the nuclear winter bringing fury like nothing Blind has seen before. Party nods and presses the patch into his hands.

The Girl notices as he pulls her out of the building, ray guns screaming through the air and the back of Ghoul all he can see. She’s crying out their names, Party, Kobra, Ghoul, asking about his eye but he can’t focus on that as he fires at the dracs streaming from the building and hears the van pull up. She’s safe that’s all that matters. Then nothing.

You don’t ignore your past, your scars in the desert. Scars are evidence of life, survival, growth; growth in the desert is important when few things dare, to its rebellion in its purest form.

They all have scars. Some they came with; some they leave with.

X

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all for reading, I hope you enjoyed this fic I had a lot of fun exploring their scars, and I have to admit the aftermath of the shoot out has always lingered in my mind. Anyways, reviews/comments are always appreciated, thank you!


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